


Entrenched

by Scratch_Pad



Category: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Gen, PTSD, Post-War, Shellshock, Stream of Consciousness, World War One
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-06
Updated: 2018-10-14
Packaged: 2019-07-27 03:04:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16210073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scratch_Pad/pseuds/Scratch_Pad
Summary: Jack and the War, an exploration.





	1. Entrenched

**Author's Note:**

> MFMM collides with my obsession with World War One literature. As may become evident, I'm a lot more used to writing non-fiction than fiction! Extensive notes appear as chapter 2.

There was nothing to do […] but practice that concealment of fear, which the long years of war had instilled, thrusting it inwards until one’s subconscious became a regular prison-house of apprehensions and inhibitions, which were later to take their revenge.

— _Testament of Youth_ , Vera Brittain

 

The process of repression is altogether unsuited for an experience of that kind, and yet that process was going on on an enormous scale and in the early days of the war was habitually recommended by everybody. “Put it out of your mind, old fellow, and do not think about it; imagine that you are in your garden at home.”

— _Report of the War Office Committee of Enquiry into "Shell-Shock”_ , 1922

 

** 1\. Outbreak **

 

He quietly removes the whistling contraption young constable Collins has attached to the station’s tea-kettle. Collins, still in need of much work on his detective skills, replaces it three times in as many days before a sergeant has a word.

“The Inspector doesn’t like the sound, lad. Just leave it.”

The Inspector, pausing tactfully around the corner, waits for the inevitable addendum:

“He had a bad war.”

 

 

Jack didn’t think his war had been an unusually bad one, as such things went. He had come back after all, and in once piece, mostly. Ten years on the warren of scars those years had dug through his mind were grown over; though there were tangles of rusted wire under there, and unexploded shells that could be unpleasant if not handled carefully. A certain management, a cultivation of his mental landscape was necessary. But he’d been all right for a while now.

The looming ten-year anniversary of Armistice was an unwelcome intrusion on his peace. Plans for the policing of ceremonials and war-pensioners protests crowd the agendas of meetings. War books and memoirs are all the rage. He can’t seem to help himself reading them in morbid fascination, though he knows it’s a bad idea. He ought to tread lightly over that ground.

Of course that damnable blast hadn’t helped.

Huge explosions were not in the common lot of even the racier parts of Melbourne policing. At the time he was calm, he always was; dropping automatically to the ground and dragging the nearest body with him. Young Collins, as it turned out, bewildered to find himself suddenly prone on the pavement, with flames leaping where an instant before it had been a black and quiet sky.

He was still working on his reports the next morning, unusually complicated and awkward to explain. How was he to phrase every single aspect of the activities of that Fisher woman? Accidentally blowing up an entire Turkish bathhouse, and stark naked besides! One had to appreciate the comical side to it.

Such a very alive, unusual person, and she had come within minutes of being blown to bits... _had he been a little slower_ … Jack frowned at his hands with disapproval and stilled their faint tremble against the surface of his desk. 

He had dreamt again that night, waking up hoarse and shaking. He sighed. Well, at least he wouldn’t be putting Rosie through all that again, not this time around.

 

***

She tells him she’s taken nothing seriously since 1918, and he suddenly recognises what had felt so familiar about her. One of those jolly can-do aristocratic ladies that came out to France for the war effort, organising hospitals and entertainments, cursing blood-soaked tourniquets in cut-glass accents. He knew the type well. 

Had she developed her driving style barrelling ambulances down shelled out roads? Yes, it all fit.

He found himself smiling. He had very much liked those women. One could talk to them freely, like a comrade, they had understood things. Many would have made better officers than their brothers and uncles. And she had even brought a hamper of warm rations for the poor benighted infantry!

 

***

 

It's nice to sit in warm room, being served good food by smiling servants, talking about literature. It reminds him, oddly, of the war. Sitting in candle-lit dugouts discussing Shakespeare with men who had been to Oxford and Cambridge, who had travelled the world and joked in latin, men such as he had only met in books where men like him, provincial police constables, were the comedy relief. She's a little patronising, to be sure, always a little surprised that he had read this or knew that; they had all been like that. 

He had only been _a temporary gentleman_ , after all, as the jocular phrase went, an officer elevated from the ranks. He had four surreal months at Cambridge, and the outrageous sum of fifty pounds to spend on a uniform and trench-coat, which still gives him his regrettably expensive tastes in clothes. He had been a decent officer, he hoped: it was in fact remarkably like being a policeman. One ambled up and down one’s beat, keeping an eye on things.  A good memory for names and faces, and a tolerance for endless paperwork came in handy. _Evening, Constable!_ the men used to rag him, and  _watch out, lads,_ _the Constable will have us and the Kaiser all down the station for disturbing the peace!_ _For affray, for property damage!_

_For murder. All of us, for murder._ She had been there, but she had been saving lives. The blood on her hands was not like his.

 

***

 

_Five years and half a world away…_

There are some duties it seems will always be his lot, and one of them is finding a way to explain to women that their husbands will not be coming home.

Died gallantly in action, killed instantly, never felt a thing, he always wrote. This woman will probably not believe his lies either.

_I went to war a newlywed_ , he tells Miss Fisher, apologising for he knows not what. For being what he was, he supposed, as opposed to what it seemed she was hoping he would be, some carefree paramour up for a romantic adventure.

_It’ll be a grand lark_ , they had said of another romantic adventure, and _the pluck and spirit of the Australian sportsman will ensure victory_ , and young Jack Robinson, plucky and spirited sportsman, had swallowed it whole. In his first sixteen seconds of combat he learned more than he had in his sixteen weeks of training: to begin with, that pluck and spirit are a very poor match for artillery and high ground.

_But you came back_ , Miss Fisher reassured him; but then she had never known lance-corporal Robinson, so of course she didn’t know that he hadn’t come back.

Lance-corporal Robinson with his open smile and ready laugh, and all his energy and ambition, had died long ago. His ghost had returned, shrouded in a trench-coat, Lieutenant Robinson of a silent blank calm, a stranger to his wife. _Is it me?_ Rosie had shouted, searching for him desperately in his own face. _What can I do differently? What are you thinking? It can’t be only the war!_

Only the war!

He tells her anecdotally, an interesting curiosity, of the warning signs that the French had put up after the Armistice around the battlegrounds of Ypres and the Somme: _Completely devastated. Damage to properties: 100%. Damage to Agriculture: 100%. Impossible to clean. Human life impossible._

Miss Fisher, he knew, would not need explanations.

_Not the same man she married sixteen years ago._

 

**2\. Stationary Warfare**

 

It will shift a few hundred yards back and forth over the months and years, but on the whole the line has been drawn. They sit peaceably in their respective trenches, obeying the Live and Let Live principle by unspoken consent. No-man’s-land stretches between them, just an ordinary field, if you didn’t know. It’s quite pretty on a sunny day, watching the flowers nodding above on the unmolested earth. _Not too bad here._

 

***

_Shellshock does strange things to the mind. It closes doors._

His own doors are firmly closed, locked, and bolted, and while the Captain Ashmeade case batters against them he is pleased that he can sit inside unshaken, his deep dugout proof against the shocks. _The officer above all must not show fear under any circumstances._  It’s hardly the first case he’s had with old soldiers gone mad, after all; though those are suicides, generally.

He can stay calm during that damned fraud of a seance, but Ashmeade's panic rattles him he must admit, and he finds himself looking to her impulsively, for comfort, for direction, for comradeship. She takes his hand, calm and steady. She would have been a first-rate officer, audacious and fearless, made Captain in three months, dead in six, he muses. 

 

_The only thing worse than being under bombardment in a trench, lads, is being under bombardment not in a trench, so the rule of modern warfare is dig in, maintain the defences, keep your damn fool head down at all times._

Sergeant Robinson has only a scant few months more experience at war than the new draft, but he will have to do: there is nobody else. Farm boys and clerks are marching to the Somme straight off the boats that brought them there. A year back, he had been like them. Recruiting-poster images of setting himself apart from common men, of proving himself in battle with his courage and brains, of some grand heroism, played through his damn-fool head.

It will not be that kind of war. It will be his faults—“mule-headed” “fussy” “over-thinking”—that are transmuted into the great virtues of trench-warfare: endurance, patience, attention to detail, carefulness. Supreme of all, self-control.

_Yes, I know it doesn’t look like a proper war, Davis, the army conveys its apologies for not living up to your heroic imaginings. Why in the bloody hell did you think they call us Diggers?_

He will not need to tell them twice when the next barrage begins. He knows a man who still herds his wife and children into the cellar every thunderstorm, or he simply can’t bear it. He didn’t go that mad, thank God. After the first year or so he can sit peacefully amongst his flowers, no longer sweating and trembling that there were no sandbags, and if heavy stuff came over it would tear through his garden walls like paper.

 

 

He forgot to keep his damn fool head down at all times.

 

One moment all is quiet, the next there is a crash of metal, the air is screaming fire. They are cowering under machine-gun fire in a knee-deep sap; fumbling for gas-masks as poison rolls over the earth. A torrent of artillery has shrieked upon them for hours. Unspeakable things happen to men he had loved. The trench is so full of the corpses of his company he can hardly get down it. A universe of inhuman machinery is bent on tearing apart every living thing remaining in the world.

He absolutely cannot do this again. There are things that are beyond human endurance. There is a limit to what a man can bear.

 

***

Perhaps he had been too hard on the girl, but motor-cars always set him off. What kind of a fool tampers with the brakes of a racing car? It’s not the murders that get to him, it’s this sort of carelessness, it’s so unnecessary, the sheer bloody waste of it.

A shriek of metal, a thin scream, the shrilling whistle of a junior constable summons him to the scene. The driver is all indignation. _Why was the child on the road?_

_Why indeed, why was the flesh of boys put in the path of hurtling metal, a very good question sir._ The driver must have been a staff officer, Jack can just tell, that smooth smug face and walrus moustache and polished boots. He is dimly aware that he was never this angry for the whole of the war. His body is still iron-hard from France and it takes two astonished constables and a passer-by to pull him away from the man.

It is fortunate for his position on the police force that one can get away with a great deal in 1919 with a officer’s rank and a Military Cross. They send him to a doctor. The doctor suggests gardening.

It’s difficult not to roll his eyes. The man is doing his best, but they have both read the same thin pamphlets on “war neurosis”. He’s not wealthy enough to have “neurasthenia” and rest cures. He never could bear being idle anyways; he needs to work. He will stick it out, and carry on.

It’s a good thing the rages are rare, because Rosie’s terrified face is the most awful thing he has ever seen and that is saying something. But it is her expression of loving concern wearying into pity that does for them. She had never seen him cry before he went away, and he tries to stifle his sobs, shut up in the bath, but it’s difficult when he can’t stop for days. And when he does stop, he sometimes stops everything entirely. 

 

_Conditions do not permit further activity._

He is glued in where he stands, up to his thighs in a sea of mud. They try to work on deepening the trenches but it oozes back as fast as it can be shovelled; they might as well dig into a bowl of porridge. Dragging rations a few hundred yards from supply trench to the firing line takes a fatigue party three hours. Everything is caked in the stuff, their hands, their hair, their rifles, their bread. He is exhausted down to the bone, down to the marrow.

But there is a kind of comfort to it. The mud puts a stop to raids and postpones battles, swallows up shells in muffled ineffectual crumps. It’s easy to close one’s eyes in the freezing rain and let oneself sink.

There is nothing to keep a hold of but his duty, but he holds onto it with iron grip. He slogs up and down the communication trenches, badgering the men to oil their feet, wrangling with the quartermaster for dry socks. He tears into a shivering, wet-eyed boy of a corporal for overloading men—B company had lost two in a week, slipped off the duckboards and dragged under by the weight of their packs. Men being shot or blown up he has become inured to; but they shouldn’t _drown_.

 

Rosie would have been a good officer. She never lets him see that she is worried about the state of things. A decent NCO too: she pulls him out of bed, pushes him under the shower, drags a shirt over his heavy arms. _Come on, soldier_ , she chirps, and he obeys dully. He sits dutifully in the doctor’s office as they go through their drill. 

_How is the gardening going? It is important to avoid emotional excitements, Mr. Robinson._

Emotional excitements! Surely he is dead to all of those now. He was mentioned in despatches for his wonderful calm under fire. He's back on his feet now, he is all right, he just wants to be left alone to his duties.

 

The gardening had been a good suggestion, he had to admit. It’s embarrassing to look up to find he’s dug himself halfway to America to just plant some roses, and Rosie is worried by the new walls, but he grows fragrant flowering vines over them, and brings the neighbours baskets of vegetables, and they are tolerant.

 

 

 

_I would feel as though it were you lying in that wreckage—please will you think about that?_

She looks up at him, disbelieving, disappointed, and elegant as always. He is letting down the unit, he is deserting, he is not _carrying on_ , not _sticking it out_ , not _playing the game_. 

Coward, coward! Who could draw that line divinding ‘shellshock’ from ‘cowardice’ from simply not being able to go on?  Why can she not understand that he doesn’t want her to go; he _needs_ her to go? She is the very definition of an _emotional excitement_. He is meant to be avoiding those, he wants to explain, but his voice jams in his throat. He has a humiliating remembrance of those weeks in ’16 he had been unable to speak, _Wounded: Shock, shell_ scrawled on his dossier. He presses his lips together and nods, mutely. 

_I will_ , he says, and is relieved that some sound comes out. 

 

 

He moves quietly through a world strewn with corpses, tasked with making some kind of sense of it all.

Lieutenant Robinson, Intelligence Officer, is going out again tonight. _Worst job in France_ , _that is_ , someone whispers, as he slips up into the sap. Jack disagrees. It’s quiet, and anything is better than a command. _Take care, sir. Good luck, sir._ It was work suitable for a ghost.

Once again, lost in the pitch-darkness of no-man’s land; the faintly glowing needle of his compass wavers and spins. Useless with this much old iron in the ground. The black sky swims with stars in unfamiliar patterns. He freezes in the glare of a Verey light rising with a hiss, illuminating like a ballroom of whirling shadows a vast circle of cratered slime.

He performs his new wonderful trick: he leaves his body to the mud and lets his mind lift away. 

Find the Great Bear, follow the lip of the cup (Dubhe, Merak) up to the faint Pole Star. A machine gun coughs angrily at him, far to the left, one of the new models, and the bullets take a little under a second to whine over his head, 300 yards away it might be. The sweep of the trajectory offers a triangulation to his hypothesised gun nest.

The world rotates in his mind, and resolves itself into his neat maps.

 

***

He dreams of her often. She is sometimes the sweet healing nurse of cool hands, or sometimes a comrade joking with wide grin, brightening the unspeakable trench. Mostly she is his CO, bold and admirable and two steps ahead, as he follows obediently into a fog of formless dangers. Rarely, horribly, she is an enemy to wrestle in darkness with fixed bayonet, desperately gasping himself awake.

The war opened up in him chasms of terror and despair he had not known existed. But into those chasms poured wellsprings of hope, of joy, of love and friendship. 

She was the Sphynx, lit up red in the dawn; she was a week’s leave in London watching Shakespeare at Drury Lane; she was the arrival of the relief; she was the sweetness of life on surviving an attack. A volume of Rilke turns up in a sack of captured papers. Some blessed, anonymous London girl holds his hand while he weeps helplessly through all of Beethoven’s Seventh. A piano has survived by some quirk of fate in a half-blown-in farmhouse, and he plays out-of-tune duets with the Captain’s violin, spinning out delirious improvisations he had no idea he was capable of.

 

***

Intelligence officer Mr Robinson counsels caution. He has conducted an extensive survey of the territory and mapped its elevations and entrenchments. _The thing is impossible sir._ The objective is too well-defended, with vast fortifications, heavy artillery, full command of the high ground. His own forces: a depleted, ragged little company, wounds barely closed up from the last action, in need of a lengthy relief somewhere far from the front lines. _It will be a massacre, sir._

It is always a massacre. The fantasies of victory against impossible odds are blown to bits, cut to pieces, die in agonies in no-man’s-land. In his boyhood stories the courage of young men was rewarded with glory, or at least noble, tragic defeat. In 1917 there is nothing noble or even tragic about expending life on wishful thinking. It is merely stupid, useless waste. 

_Perhaps some other time, at a less dangerous hour._

 

He can see her disappointment as he retreats, again and again. How easy it would be to surrender, to stop fighting and lift empty hands, cry _kamerad!_ and follow her, captive, up those steps to her boudoir. She would smile in triumph, but he would be treated well, so they said.

Was it only his damnable pride? Surely it was largely that. He hardly understood himself sometimes, especially as he lay alone in a cold bed wondering why on earth he was here instead of over there, accepting that brief gift of warmth and pleasure.

But, _the capture of a trench is an easy matter compared to retaining it,_ as the manuals put it. What was the use, if the ground could not be consolidated? He could lead a charge, push manfully through the wire, engage in hand-to-hand, even take some feet of territory. And then where would he be? Stranded out alone again on alien ground, flank exposed, utterly vulnerable to the counter-attack. Far behind him the support needed to secure his position would flounder, the horses breaking their hearts and their slim legs, hopelessly trying to drag their burdens across a morass of impossibilities, all for nothing, nothing.

***

 

Fingers drumming nervously at the steering wheel. The ticking of his watch and the hammering of his heart put him absurdly in mind of going over the top. _Zero minus two minutes, soldier._

He should just stay here, where it’s safe.

Lieutenant Robinson tries to breathe himself into an officer’s confidence. Sergeant Robinson sternly bucks himself up, pull yourself together man, no way out but through. Lance-corporal Robinson, that youth innocent of pain, is quivering with excitement.

Will the assault be called off? It will not be called off. The inevitability of doom settles over him, but there is also the relief of getting it over with, of finally taking physical action. _Fix bayonets._ He takes a breath, closes his eyes, and clambers out.

Ten minutes later, he has fled ignominiously back to his trench.

It had been as he predicted, a damned silly stunt. A panicked, disorderly retreat, an absolute rout. He should be court-martialled for cowardice. He should have had the decency to die a glorious death.

He rests his head on the steering wheel and laughs helplessly at himself for five minutes, as he has not laughed in years.

Fix bayonets! How Phryne would have teased him!

 

**_3\. Open Warfare_ **

 

In two years, the line has not moved by more than a few hundred yards in either direction. It feels as though this will last forever, or at least until everybody in the world is dead.

But there has been a the revolution in the east; from the west, the Americans are coming. In the spring of ’18, German divisions freed from the Eastern Front hurl themselves against the Allied lines. They advance more than forty miles in a week, tearing through the old established defences.

Then so abruptly he struggles to adjust, he is the one chasing. Racing ahead of his battalion on motor-cycle reconnaissance, far beyond the old corpse-rotten trenches, new territories open up before his eyes. Green and fertile fields, leafy woods, homely cottages. His is greeted by cheers and kisses, by strafing aeroplanes, by covering fire and counter-attacks. At last he can move and dodge and strategise; the terrible paralysis has been broken. Something is _happening_. There will be victory, or defeat; some sort resolution will come.

 

They cede more and more territory to each other; their borders are being re-drawn day by day.

 

The tennis ball drops towards him against the sky. An image of a trench-mortar’s arcing trajectory flashes over him, but it is only an image, with a distant memory of fear, and he directs his body to run towards it, finding older memories of a younger self to guide him. He connects his racket smoothly with the projectile and it doesn’t explode, as things generally don’t in his world now, and it wings off away from him, lightly, and he chases after it as she returns it to him. He is breathing in hard gasps, but he isn’t afraid, or fighting. He can’t remember when he last _played_.

He is almost startled by the sound of his own laughter.

 

_Apres la guerre_ , they had joked ironically with each other— _never_. For years he has scarcely allowed his mind to think past the next week; past the next hour even, when on the line.

Fantastical ideas of a _future_ , of _coming home_ , begin treacherous intrusions to his consciousness. _When I go home_ —he starts, and stops himself, fearful of the fates.

 

**_4\. Armistice_ **

 

When it finally comes they are stunned by it.

His first reaction, on receiving the official telegram, _all hostilities to cease at 11 am_ , is confusion, as all his plans are thrown into disarray. _There will be no intercourse of any description with the enemy._

Everything will return to normal, but no one has any idea what normal means anymore.

 

It was Hugh Collins who told him, shining with happiness, coming to his desk to ask if would he stand up for him that very night. He was getting married tonight, sir, as Miss Fisher was flying off to England tomorrow, would you believe it! and she couldn’t say when or even if she would be back.

_Of course, Collins, I’d be honoured_ , and his best officer’s face doesn’t waver. He can even summon a reassuring smile.

It was all over. She had left him with hardly a word, and he suspected not much more of a thought, as he always knew she would. The worst had happened.

But, he was all right. He could watch her calmly at the wedding, as she failed to meet his eye the whole evening. Whether she was avoiding him deliberately, or she simply wasn’t thinking of him, didn't matter anymore.  He doesn’t even bother going home that night, with a positive three-volume novel of a report to write. He’s hardly likely to sleep anyhow. 

But he can’t keep his mind on the job. It insists on writing a different report, an intelligence summary of the last year or so, and his command does not come off very well in it. _A good officer but lacking in initiative. No dash, Robinson!_

It seemed suddenly utterly mad that in the better part of two years he had failed to so much as kiss her. 

_What’s the risk?_ he had asked her, waltzing her with funereal gravity, risk assessments and casualty estimates in triplicate spooling through his head. No wonder she had eyed him quizzically, as they danced one disc after the other, all that sunny afternoon in an empty ballroom. Perfect bliss! Which was to say, not the _ultimate_ bliss, but he had been so afraid to spoil it.

He ought to have spoiled it, to hell with it, ought to have pulled her close right then, kissed her with all he had. What had he been so afraid of? 

 

Damn it, he ought to at least have kissed her, properly, once.

 

***

He kisses her.

_Tag!_ She says.

_Chase me, chase me! Can’t catch me!_

And she lifted up and flew away, weightless, taking nothing seriously. _There’s a whole world out there._ It was only a game after all. 

 

***

 

He is standing in broad daylight, unharmed in the middle of no-mans-land.

An impulse had grown on him on long weeks aboard ship, leaning on the railing with the fresh wind in his hair. He alighted at Calais, sent a hasty telegram, and took that familiar railway eastwards.

“Do you need a guide, monsieur?” A officious little man jogs up to him. “Ah, no,” he says, as Jack turns to him. “I can see that you don’t. Bless you sir.”

“I don’t know about that,” Jack smiles politely. “It all looks so different.” Could Poiziers, that mountain of fire, really be that gentle hill? Mametz, hung with corpses, that young frosty wood? There are children rolling down the grassy slope of a shell hole, laughing.

The guide tuts with dismay. “Such disrespect!” He starts forward to warn them away.

“Oh, no!” Jack reaches out a hand, staying him. “Let them enjoy themselves. It was a long time ago.” It should live again, this place.

 

_See Chapter Two for Notes_


	2. Notes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Notes to "Entrenched"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> These may be slightly out of order! WWI is an obsession of mine and it's irresistible to map tropes and events from the war onto these characters.

_—The Inspector doesn’t like the sound—_ The whistle of a teakettle reminded many wwi veterans of the whistles used by officers to communicate during attacks. A responder to a survey on WWI trauma wrote that his grandfather in his 80s “could not be in the kitchen when the kettle was whistling”.

— _One of those jolly can-do aristocratic ladies_ —Phryne, like most female ambulance drivers, was from the upper classes and may well have provided her own ambulance for one of the many ad-hoc volunteer groups. A model for Phryne would be [Dorothy Fielding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothie_Feilding), daughter of an Earl, awarded the Military Medal for her fearless driving under shell-fire. Her collected letters are a great read.

— _A temporary gentleman—_ By 1916 thousands of men were being brought up from the ranks, ie the working classes, to fill gaps caused by “wastage” of officers who died in incredible numbers. Dutiful, literate, athletic Jack, confident and cool under fire, would have ticked every single box for a temporary commission (and to my eye he _acts_ like an officer). Breaking the age-old link of ‘officer and gentleman’ and the class discomforts this created during and after the war is a common theme in books of the ‘20s—the most famous ‘temporary gentleman’ in fiction is probably gamekeeper and ex-lieutenant Mellors, the titular _Lady Chatterley’s Lover_. A search of the ever-useful Australian Newspaper Archive to see if the term was used in Australia turns up several examples, including an intersting article (albeit a reprint from a British paper) on marriage and class citing the marriages "[of the highborn V.A.D and the 'temporary gentleman' in khaki",](http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article213610880) embarrassed by his 'lumbering dancing' after the war...

_—£50 for a uniform and trench-coat_ —roughly £3500 in todays money. Before the war, officers were assumed to be men of independent means who could afford to turn themselves out as befit their station. Working-class men couldn’t afford an officer’s uniform so provision was made for them. I’ve decided this is where Jack got his taste for tailored suits and for pomaded hair, another officerish style choice. 

— _Shrouded in a trench-coat_ —not for nothing does the cynical, quietly ironic, hard-boiled detective wear a _trench-_ coat—Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammet were both WWI veterans and brought the fatalistic detatchment so characteristic of trench warfare to their fictional detectives. 

\- _the signs that the French had put up after Armistice —_ Jack’s quote is the actual wording describing the designation [Zone Rouge](http://www.messynessychic.com/2015/05/26/the-real-no-go-zone-of-france-a-forbidden-no-mans-land-poisoned-by-war/).

_—Wounded: Shock, shell_. The pscychological effects of sitting helpless under heavy artillery gave PTSD its first name. As the US Army Medical Board put it in 1929: “The frequency of mental and nervous affections was remarked by medical writers in every combatant nation, and all agreed that the terrible conditions of modern warfare, with its new methods of fighting – high explosives, liquid fire, tanks, poison gas, bombing planes, the ‘warfare of attrition’ in the trenches – contributed to the creation of a novel disease entity.” Medical officers identify the most susceptible as sensitive, introverted, responsible men, the ‘good type of man’ who ‘doesn’t spare himself’ and ‘go on struggling to do their duty until they finally collapse entirely’, which does rather bring poor Jack to mind. Mutism was one of the most common symptoms. Most cases recovered within a few weeks and were returned to the front.

— _A universe of inhuman machinery—_ WWI was one of the deadliest wars in history for the soldier: in front-line infantry, a quarter died, a quarter were permanently maimed. Bayonets and snipers were responsible for only the loose change of battlefield casualties: two-thirds were from artillery, one third from machine-guns, both from ranges of a half-mile or more away. 

\- _Intelligence Officer —_ As he speaks German, is a police detective, rides motorcycles over rough terrain, surveys territory with binoculars, was evidently briefed on experimental weapons, and is obsessed with writing reports, I’m pegging Jack specifically as an intelligence officer. They were responsible for reconnaissance, map-making, counter-intelligence, interrogating prisoners, and preparing Intelligence Summaries on local battlefield conditions. They were otherwise normal officers attached to infantry batallions, took part in raids and battles, and led the usual hellish trench existence. [An evocative drawing of a rather Jackish ANZAC IO](https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=RT8IAQAAQBAJ&lpg=PA107&dq=ANZAC%20corps%20intelligence&pg=PA107#v=onepage&q&f=true).Phryne identifies herself as an Intelligence agent presumably with the Secret Service, a very different and (of course!) far more glamorous role.

— _The worst job in France—_ A particular duty of the intelligence officer was nocturnal patrols of no-man’s-land to keep track of enemy activity. The memoir _Old Soldiers Never Die_ describes a German-fluent officer (presumably the batallion intelligence officer) regularly crawling out at night to eavesdrop on the enemy trenches; the writer who was no stranger to horrors considered this “the worst job in France.” Edmund Blunden’s memoir _Undertones of War_ has [a description of a typical IO patrol](https://archive.org/stream/undertonesofwar00edmu#page/174/%20).

— _a Military Cross—_ I feel ok giving Jack an MC, a noble but not exceptionally rare decoration, partly because he’s exactly the sort of person who would have distinguished himself in the Great War, and partly to explain how he not only kept his job after the strike(an idle search of the Australian newspaper archive turns up controversy over blacklisting striking policemen as late as 1927) but even moved up the ranks—on the assumption a decorated officer would difficult to fire.

— _the same thin pamphlets on “war neurosis” —_ For instance, [_Care and Treatment of War Neurosis_](https://archive.org/stream/caretreatmentofm00salmrich#page/26), 1917, [_Shell-Shock and Its Lessons_](https://archive.org/details/shellshockitsles00smitiala), 1918. Difficult to read both literally and figuratively, but a fascinating document, is the 1922 [_War Office Report on Shellshock_](https://wellcomelibrary.org/item/b18295496#?c=0&m=0&s=0&cv=0&z=-0.2506%2C-0.1261%2C1.5012%2C0.9194) An[ excerpt detailing the horrific conditions](https://wellcomelibrary.org/item/b19198036#?c=0&m=0&s=0&cv=0) on the front is particularly vivid.Ten years after armistice there were still over 65,000 veterans on disability with shell-shock in the UK alone. 

\- _Verey light,_ variously spelled Very, Verrey, or Verey. Flares used to illuminate the battlefield. [No Man’s Land under a Verey light](https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2014/may/14/art-apocalypse-otto-dix-first-world-war-der-krieg-in-pictures#img-7) by Otto Dix

_—It will be a massacre, sir—_ There were two Heads of Intelligence during the war- the first, Charteris, had an optimism that had a disatrous resonance with that of Field Marshall Haig, tending to assessments that aimed at boosting morale rather than realism. The great massacres at Somme and Paschendaele are generally attributed to the optimism of Charteris and Haig. Charteris was replaced by Edgar Cox after the latter battle; Cox drowned in a suspected suicide in the summer of '18, in despair over Haig's 'wishful thinking' which consistently ignored intelligence warnings and cost the lives of thousands.

_—What was the use of a successful attack, if the ground could not be consolidated?—_ this could describe almost every engagement of wwi, but as an ANZAC, Jack would almost certainly have been at Passchendale, one of the greatest military disasters of the 20th century. Some quarter of a million men on all sides were killed in the campaign that barely moved the line in either direction.

_—Motor-cycle reconnaissance._ The motorcycle was the iconic vehicle of the intelligence officer (though they were also expected to “sit a horse for a reasonable amount of time”). From an AIF war diary, 1918: “After the advance was made a reconnaissance was at once carried out by the intelligence officer of all the roads and tracks through the newly-occupied territory.”

\- Tourism on the Western Front started soon after the war, though large sections were fenced off as too dangerous, are still are to this day. The area remains full of unexploded shells, gas shells, and arsenic; local farmers still turn up an annual “iron harvest” of hundreds of tons of munitions.


	3. Homefront

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For what do we fic, but to impose our headcanons on the fandom? Some Jack and Rosie backstory. 
> 
> I can’t make head nor tail of some of the timeline around the war, especially with Phryne, but also Jack clearly says he was married “16 years ago”, so in 1912, but also “went to war a newlywed.” Then Jack says he’s only known George Sanderson for ‘nearly 15 years’, giving a better date for a just-pre-war wedding.

1912

Rosie’s father will always regret the generous impulse that led him to invite young Constable Robinson to dinner.

He had graduated top of his class from Police School, which _isn’t saying much_ , grumbles Station Chief Sanderson, _nothing but country louts._ But Robinson is a cut above, an athlete and even a bit of a scholar, energetic and ambitious. Generally known as a _rising man_ , and Rosie eyes him shyly from the opposite end of the dinner table. He has merry blue eyes, a tumble of chesnut curls, and a frightfully shabby suit. She can see an awkward but careful mend on one shoulder.

“Who is reading _Howard’s End?”_ he asks, after a temporary lull in her father’s monologue. He has spotted it on the side table, where Rosie had been loathe to abandon it. She is the bookish one of the family.

“I am,” Rosie says. “Have you read it, Mr. Robinson? It’s such a different world!”

“Oh yes!” he says eagerly, “Some of it reminds me of my family. Unfortunately we’re _peculiar and German_ , like the Schlegels, but poor like the Basts!”

“And are we the upper-class, pompous Wilcoxes?” she can’t help but shoot back.

“Rosie!” her mother scolds primly. “Behave like a lady.” Constable Robinson’s dark blue eyes, which always seem to be laughing at some private joke, sparkle at her across the table, and Rosie has to stifle a snort.

“Surely Australia has no class system, Miss Sanderson!” he replies, an ironic edge to his voice, and he quirks her a sideways smile.

“Quite right, Robinson,” her father says approvingly. “A man can make himself in this country.”

 

“What did he mean, peculiar and German?” she asks after the constable has left.Her father frowns at her suspiciously, and she tries to look merely idly curious. His father was a sergeant on the force, of good British stock, he tells her, died of the heart six or seven years ago—excellent man, very steady, very reliable. It’s the mother’s side that’s, well…musicians of some sort, or poets or some such nonsense, German emigrés of the intellectual kind, that were always getting themselves into scrapes.

 _Bohemians,_ sniffs her mother. An imprudent marriage, Robinson ought to have had a useful wife. It was ridiculous of him to marry someone _artistic_ on a constable’s salary. Rosie’s father did not make that mistake. Mrs. Sanderson’s family is in shipping, and doing very well.

Rosie wonders how to find an opportunity to talk to Constable Robinson about _Howard’s End._ Did he think it plausible Miss Shlegel would marry that dull Mr. Wilcox? She imagines discussing with him the scandalous ending, and she feels her cheeks grow hot at the thought.

 

Packs of girls congregate to pretend not to stare, giggling as he ambles past on his regular beat. He touches his helmet at Rosie with a wry smile and winks. He may be just a constable, but Rosie knows he could have any girl in Australia when he smiles like that. She rather thinks he knows it too.

She goes for tea with her mother to the ramshackle little house he lives in with his mother and sisters, cluttered with foreign books and strange prints and musical intruments. Constable Robinson’s mother is a little birdlike woman with a German accent; she talks sensibly to Rosie’s mother, but she has her son’s secretly laughing eyes.

His three noisy, bold sisters, sprawling on chairs every which-way, argue loudly about politics and books and who stole whose boots. They have masses of reddish-blonde hair, tall, lithe bodies, and all of them are so good-looking it seems almost unnatural. Rosie feels a stiff, gawky girl next to these creatures. She can feelConstable Robinson’s anxious eyes on every interaction, and tries her very best to be sociable.

“Constable Robinson! What a mouthful!” his younger sister Hattie laughs. “Just call him Jack, everybody does.”

Rosie has never met people quite like this. It seems they all make do on Constable Robinson— _Jack’s_ —salary and whatever else they come by. His mother writes stories and articles, his twin sister Laura sings.

“Just wait until I’m famous and rich, Jackie,” Laura says, smirking, “Then I’ll pay you back double, and you can buy all those nice clothes you’re hankering after to impress the girls!”

 

Jack walks them home decorously in the early evening. “Your sisters are very, um…energetic,” she tries, as he seems a bit tongue-tied. Possibly he is intimidated by her mother’s beady eyes upon them.

“It’s good practice for policing,” he grins. “I’ve been breaking up riots since I could walk.”

Jack, for his part, seems awestruck by the quiet order of her father’s house, its law books and many rooms and silent servants. He listens respectfully to her father’s pontificating, in a way that even Rosie finds a little funny. He blushes when her father corrects his pronunciation of words.

 

1913

Her family can’t really believe she will throw herself away on a penniless constable. They’ve always been able to afford a servant or two; she has no idea what sort of life she would have to lead, keeping house without one. This will pass, if they don’t do anything foolish, such as increase his considerable glamour by forbidden love. They allow the walks and the lending of books, and doubles tennis matches, at which they soon become a formidable pair—Rosie’s no bluestocking _,_ and likes sport.

“Father wants me to marry a lawyer, like my sister Margaret did,” she says after a match, feeling some ground should be established.

He smiles at her. “You’ll be able to be a lawyer yourself, soon,” he says, “I heard they were talking of letting women take the bar in New South Wales.”

“Are you suggesting I’m very fond of arguing?” she teases. “But I wouldn’t want to argue all day!”

“Don’t you want to go to university, like your brother?” he asks wistfully.

“University!” she stares at him. “Oh, I used to dream about it when I was a girl, but father would never…I mean we could only afford to send Charlie, really.”

He nods gravely. “I wish we could send at least Sophie. She’d set them on their ears, she’s so clever.”

“Your sisters are so beautiful, Jack, don’t you think one of them will make the family fortune by marrying some rich toff?” she says, looking at him archly.

He laughs. “He’d be a brave man! Whoever marries Hattie better get himself some shin-guards.”

Rosie laughs with him, and wishes she were richer, and sighs.

 

 

He doesn’t dare to ask her to go _with_ him, that first year, but they dance at the Firemen and Policemen’s Ball, and Jack’s strong supple body swings her her round and round until she feels she is flying.

 

Sensible, patient Jack thinks they should wait. He had seen how his mother struggled, when his father was still so poor. He can’t keep her properly on his constable’s salary, and he’s still supporting his mother and sisters. When he makes sergeant, they can marry.

“But that’s…years! Dan O’Shaugnessy wasn’t a sergeant until he was twenty-seven!”

He raises his chin in his arrogant way, which is both annoying and attractive. “I think I can manage it a little faster than O’Shaugnessy, thank you.”

He’s full of ambitions and plans. There’s so much that needs reforming in the police system, and he means to be the man to do it.

They treat policemen as though they were day labourers, when they were “the bulwark of civilization”, he declares, and ought to think of themselves as such, too _._ There’s so many officers _on the take_. He thinks it’s the low salaries, it does so lay men open to temptation. And they ought to have a female constabulary, he says hotly one day, to police the women’s—he glances at her, suddenly shy—the women’s _situations_. It’s not right to have big rough men raiding such places.

Rosie’s father never speaks to her about things like this, and she listens with eyes wide. To be the helpmeet of such a man, accomplishing great things, fills her with pride.

 

 

1914

Jack is exultant when he succeeds in enlisting, on his second try—only Australia’s finest will go to make the nation’s name in war, and they are turning down ten for every man they accept. Advancements and promotions are offered to men who sign up, and Jack is ever-ambitious for advantage.

Her cousins and brother, having been in the cadets and at university, are in officer training, with smart uniforms and lordly airs of command. Jack is a common private, though he is promised a lance-corporal’s stripe, if he does well. It’s not fair, Jack is older and so much cleverer than all of them, and far better read, for all he never went to university.

“Never mind, Rosie—it’s a step on the ladder! I can come back a sergeant—everyone says there will be great chances for advancement once the fighting starts!”

Rosie does not want to think of the fighting starting. “Oh Jackie, please promise you’ll be careful, and don’t…don’t take any chances you don’t have to.”

But Jack is overflowing with young masculine energy. “ _Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot, Röslein auf der Heiden_ …” he croons, waltzing her around his mother’s parlour.

“Jack, don’t sing in German!” she shrieks, laughing, “You’ll be taken up for a spy!”

“Ze Englishers vill never catch me, Fräulein, I am too clever for zem!” He strikes a stage-villain pose and stalks her wickedly across the room. She flees, and allows him to catch her amongst the piles of books behind the sofa.

Suddenly the thought of never truly being with him is unbearable.

“Oh Jack, let’s get married before you go!” she gasps, before she can stop herself. He becomes instantly serious, and frowns unhappily.

“I…I don’t know, Rosie…” But she can see he has been thinking it too. He’s made Senior Constable after all. Her heart starts to hammer and she presses herself against him.

“You want to too, don’t you?” she whispers. He’s always been the one to draw the line, to say its time for him to go, and get up andstand apart, flushed and breathing hard, while she gasps with nameless frustrations on the sofa. Rosie never told her mother that Jack’s sisters are terrible chaperones.

“I might lose an arm or a leg, or worse, Rosie…it’s not right to tie you to me now.”

“Oh! So if you come back without an arm, then you think I would leave you, would I?” she said hotly. “Wouldn’t you need me more than ever?”

He doesn’t have an answer to this, but his jaw is taking on its most mulish set.

“I’m sorry Jack…never mind. You might meet someone else while you’re away…”

He bursts out laughing. “In Turkey! I don’t think one really meets many women in a war, Rosie. But _you_ might meet someone else, love, and there’s no knowing how long I’ll be gone, I could be away for a year, or even more.”

“Jack Robinson, I have met _plenty_ of men since we’ve been courting. I have had _years_ to meet other men.” She wraps her arms around him. “You’re the best man in Australia and I’m holding onto you, mate.”

She can feel him smile against her cheek.

“What if you don’t come back,” she mumbles, into his neck.

“But Rosie, love, what if…what if you get with child, and I don’t come back?”

“Oh Jackie,” she smiles tearfully up at him. The thought of having his child! She strokes a hand through his chestnut curls. “‘Would you lead these graces to the grave, and leave the world no copy?’”

Shakespeare is always the way to win him over. His eyes, to her slight horror, brim with tears. She had never thought of Jack _crying_. His hands, always so strong and steady, feel strange trembling on her sides.

 

 

Their families are resigned. It was about time, really, and neither of them showed any sign of growing out of it, as everyone rather thought they would.

It’s decided that the little house shall go to Jack and Rosie, to get them started, on the presumption Jack won’t be away too long. Jack’s sisters have moved on, though none married rich aristocrats. Laura has married a musician as poor as she; Sophie has gone to Sydney for _work,_ of all things. Hattie is studying for a nurse, and mostly rooms with her vast round of friends; she’s planning on shipping out to Egypt herself as soon as she can manage it. Jack’s mother will go to Sydney and stay with her brother, at least for their honeymoon.

Rosie’s brother Charlie is furious. How was he supposed to explain to the other officers that his brother-in-law was a bloody lance-corporal? He wouldn’t be able to show his face. At least he would be in a different batallion, thank god, so he wouldn’t have to give him orders.

“When did you get to be such a snob!” Rosie is incredulous. “Your own grandfather was a sheep-shearer!” Their father’s father the sheep-shearer had been a frequent object lesson in self-improvement.

“You had one road to help raise us up, Rosie, and you throw it away!” He’s red with anger. “Just because he’s so good-looking!”

Jack has family strife of his own.

“Laura’s not speaking to me,” he says, miserably. “She’s taken up notions about the British Empire.”

“She’s not siding with Germany!” Rosie gasps. The papers are full of talk of interning German men to prevent them from joining the enemy, and Jack is worried about his cousins.

“No, she thinks the whole war is bunk. She won’t hear about Belgium or... Anyhow of course I have to go! It wouldn’t be right if others went and I didn’t. She’s being ridiculous.”

 

They have three months before he ships out for Egypt. Rosie will never say so, but the marriage has been a horrible, a catastrophic mistake. How can she ever bear to be apart from him now?

 

1915

His letters come in batches, weeks apart, brief and cheerful and grubby with dirt. Poor Jack, he so hated being untidy!

He writes, with detectable smugness, that his section’s corporal is in disgrace, having “lost his head over the fleshpots of Egypt”, and Jack has his full corporal’s stripe before he’s even seen a battle. He is full of optimism that he will continue to move up and make her proud. Rosie anxiously writes back reminding him to please not to do anything silly.

She answers the door cheerfully the first time. No one has learned yet to see the telegraph boy not with anticipation, but with dread.

Her two cousins are killed in the first week of the Gallipoli campaign. Charlie comes back six months later, without one leg and not saying very much. He takes her hand one day and speaks softly, looking at the wall. “You were right about dear old Jack, Rosie. It was all rot. I hope he comes back all right for you.”

She can’t bear being alone in the silent little bungalow, with its suspect roof and shabby mismatched furniture, and unfamiliar neighbours so much poorer and less educated than her own. And she very much misses having servants. She moves back in with her parents and poor Charlie.

Jack writes back understandingly, if briefly—Could she arrange to rent out the house? His mother seems settled in Sydney now, and they can pay off the mortgage faster. He thinks the war might last a long time.

Her parents arrange the complicated business of renting.

Telegrams appear periodically at the door, sending icy drenchings of terror in the moments between the knock of the telegraph boy and the panicked scanning of the message. John Robinson promoted to sergeant, one telegram says; she would feel happier about it, had not a neighbour whose husband was a sergeant in Jack’s company received a ‘regret to inform’ the week before.

John Robinson wounded, in hospital in Egypt, John Robinson will be posted to the Western Front in France.

****

1916

He sends her pretty silk postcards from France, and very occasional letters. It must be very dull for her alone, he writes, and suggests raising the issue of university for her with her father again, like they had talked about. These curt, brief letters of his! They used to talk for hours, but they never _wrote_ , so perhaps he just doesn’t like writing.

Rosie does not mention university to her father. She’s never been able to get across to Jack that’s she’s just not like those university women; she likes to learn things, but she’s happy to be a good wife, to help him in his work and ambitions. Her friends and neighbours are keeping themselves busy with bazaars and charities for the war effort, and there is plenty to do keeping house for her mother, and looking after Charlie.

There is more talk of conscription. The throngs of eager volunteers of ’14 has evaporated, and they are struggling to find replacements for the dead and wounded. Men are beginning to come back from France, with empty sleeves, crutches and eye-patches, and gaunt, haunted faces. The newspapers talk of ‘furious fighting’ on the Western Front; the gallant Australians are winning great victories.

There are no more letters, short or not, for a very long time.

****

1917

 _“Did you hear about Nellie’s husband, Captain Russel?”_ one of her least favourite cousins hisses with ghastly relish at a fundraising tea. “ _He’s come home, but he’s not wounded as they said. He’s gone stark staring mad!”_

Rosie has never ‘cut’ someone in her life, but she gives her her frostiest look and walks away when she has an excuse, and hopes that counts.

Finally a long letter in his small neat hand. He sounds like himself, cheerful and joking. He is very sorry for not writing, things had been so busy since he made sergeant, it was difficult to get a moment, and then he had been ill for a while after the Somme. The important news is that he has been put up for a commission, and by the time she gets this letter he will be training for an officer. In Cambridge no less!

_They have given me the outrageous sum of fifty pounds to spend on a uniform! I’ll never hear the end of it from Laura._

This news gets her father’s attention. His son-in-law, Lieutenant Robinson, has a fine ring to it. If the war goes on for a while, at the rate he’s going he might make captain. He always knew Robinson—Jack—was a rising man.

1918

Yet another friend has recieved the dreaded telegram, _regret to inform_. Rosie catches a tiny, shameful part of herself feeling envious. At least her waiting was over, and she was free to live again.

The Spanish influenza floods out of military hospitals, and carries away Rosie’s mother, any number of Jack’s cousins, and poor old Charlie at last.

Another telegram, not _regret to inform_ this time either _._ Her father makes sure to get a notice put in the newspapers: _MILITARY CROSS: It has been learned by cable that Lt. JOHN ‘JACK’ ROBINSON, lately of the City South constabulary and son-in-law of City South Chief G. Sanderson, has been awarded the Military Cross for conspicuous gallantry, conducting critical reconnaissance under heavy fire as batallion Intelligence Officer._

 _Yes, Dear Jack was always so brave, we are all so proud of him._ She plays her part, but she feels like an impostor. Dear Jack is a faded memory, like a childhood friend long since moved away; Lt. John Robinson is a figure from a storybook.

 

1919

He seems to fill the whole room with an alien, animal presence.

He sits on the edge of the old sofa— _their_ sofa, in their silent little house— looking down at his hands clasped in front of him. He looks strange in his intimidating officer’s uniform, with its complicated layers, khaki tie tight against his throat. The soft tumble of his chestnut curls is gone, slicked back and dark against his skull, making the bones of his brow and jaw stand out sharply.

After a long while he looks up at her. His eyes—were they not bluer before? but that can’t have changed?—scan over her. His face is strange and blank, his expressive mouth a thin line. She feels childish tears coming and angrily brushes them away.

His brow furrows, and he reaches out a hand out to her. It’s huge and covered with puckered scars, and doesn’t look like her Jack’s hand at all. She can’t help but start back from it.

He stops immediately, as though he has frightened an animal. Then he smiles faintly, almost invisibly, an odd expression she has never seen on his half-remembered face, a ghost of his bright familiar grin.

“You’re a little frightening to me too.” His voice is deeper and rougher than she remembers. But still kind.

She laughs a little and takes his hand. It is also rougher than she remembers, and cool. She sits next to him, not quite touching his side.

“It’ll be all right, Rosie,” he says, calmly. He does not look at her. It sounds like something he has said many times before, although she can’t remember him saying it to her. He is still holding her hand in a loose, cool grip. “It’ll be all right.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Elaborate explanations no one asked for:
> 
> Peculiar and German —As Jack recognises Rilke in German he must be both fluent and unusually au currant with modernist culture. He generally doesn’t seem to have a facility for languages so I’m with those giving a family background. Also I’ve been reading Howard’s End (which came out in 1911) so everyone else is too.
> 
> Noisy, bold sisters—I have no primary sources for this but there is no way Jack doesn’t have sisters.
> 
> Letting women take the bar - not until 1918, as it turned out. Dr. Macmillian side note- in looking this up, I found women lobbying to take the bar were advised to study medicine instead, as a more feminine occupation!
> 
> A constable’s salary —The ever-helpful Australian newspaper archive tells me a police constable was making ‘less than the basic wage of an unskilled worker’ before the ‘23 strike, on a seven day week. Most constables seem to have been Hugh-type lads of the lower working class and farm boys. https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/250078816
> 
> Fleshpots of Egypt - Australian forces quickly became notorious for bad behaviour in the Egyptian training camps, and rioted at the Battle of Wazza,
> 
> Military Cross-- an example of the type of notice Rosie's father gets put in the paper- and also a good model for Jack's progression up the ranks  
> http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article15719113
> 
>  
> 
> Working slowly on Phryne's wartime experience as ambulance driver and SURELY in international espionage... thank you so much for commenting, comments are LIFE.


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